Sad circumstances

So... wow, this seems a bit surreal. I mean, he was only my student for a quarter, but I still said hi to him in the halls and he was always very polite and kind to me. I think he got in trouble a lot in the other classes on my team, though.

I'm pretty sure he was dealing, or at least doing, drugs; after parent-teacher conferences, me and a bunch of other teachers who were getting ice cream saw him standing around the 7-11 with a large wad of cash in his hand. He was ready to bolt when he saw us careen into the parking lot, but once he saw it was us he relaxed, thumbed his money, and then poked it into his pocket without making eye contact with any of us. When we called his name and asked him why he wasn't at school that day, he smiled timidly and shrugged.

He made a horribe, tragic decision. Now he has to live with the consequences of having killed a friend.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/6DD6201241761F6E862574340049BE51?OpenDocument

excerpt: "Eduardo was sitting in a chair, on the back porch of a home, when a 14-year-old boy shot him in the top of his head."

Sad : (

I found out that one of my former students (from second quarter), Christian, killed a boy on accident yesterday morning when he was playing with a gun he had bought off the street. He's now in jail, and will not be returning to school obviously. He was a nice, sweet student to me; never gave me any real issues. I am beyond surprised and hurt for him; he seemed above that sort of thing, you know--buying a gun off the streets. I guess it just hit a little close to home for me.

I feel like I've been set up to fail.

Honestly, I am feeling very down on myself at the moment. I probably shouldn't be writing right now, but if I don't get these feelings out I think I'll drown from the intensity of it all.

We are done with MAP and are on the last leg of make-ups for it. Unfortunately, that means my mentor has been sucked up in the position of the MAP tester, so for the entire month of April she's been dealing with that bull. Not to mention that after MAP is done, she has to do all sorts of menial jobs when in reality... I need her now more than ever with this stupid paper coming to a close. I don't know how Ashley is feeling, but I am stuck and needing some serious help in terms of time--which I don't have much of.

I've been videotaping myself! Literally! I should have had someone in there helping me, but because my mentor is trapped in a precarious position, she is unable to do it for me. I don't even know if what I'm doing is good or if it's showing anything at all. What if my questions are all wrong? What if my students come off as one did today--completely moronic and not knowing what on earth she had read but was convinced she had read the entire story only to have gotten every iota of detail completely and utterly wrong? That shows no growth! That just shows how shitty of a reader they are, and how shitty of a teacher I am!!

I don't feel as though I am a good teacher. I've been going through my data and realizing that I don't believe that my test students have made ANY progress. Lemme repeat: NO progress. I'm literally depressed wondering how I managed to fail an entire group of kids, and I feel overwhelmed at the thought of fishing through the data for a spark of hope that one of them learned something.

I was completely unprepared to teach this course, and after many trials and tribulations I thought I had it down. Apparently not. I can't help but wonder if the program had been up and running from the beginning of school--LIKE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN--if my students would have made gains instead of remaining stagnant. It might be me, and my style of teaching, though, that has failed the students.

Mizzou is all about reflecting on your teaching and blah blah blah. Here's a thought: I'm reflecting on the fact that I was never introduced to a course that taught me how to deal with Special Education children, and their learning processes until my Masters program (which means, WHOOPS, too late!).

Oh, and another--why is it that I feel as if I am was set up, spectacularly, to FAIL during my first year of teaching?

Taking over the learning process = differentiated instruction!

Hatija comes to me during my 6th hour, and lately we've been reading together and doing sight words. However, when I asked her why she doesn't seem to like writing, she explained that she doesn't know how to spell a lot of words and is self-conscious about it; she wants to know more words so that she's more comfortable with spellings and meanings. So we came up with a solution together, and she wanted me to share it with her other teachers in the hopes that she could continue this in their classrooms. (Literally, she came up to me today and said, "Do you have Mrs. Kerber's (et cetera) email address? Can you tell [them] what we talked about yesterday?").

Here's the plan we concocted together:

1. She tells me the words she really wants to know how to spell. I write them down (it's a list of 26), then give her the list to repeatedly write out over and over again every day. At the end of the week she'll take a quiz, and whatever words she passes gets replaced with new words, and the words she misses will be re-put onto the list.

2. She will also write the words in sentences, define them, draw what they mean to her--all to give her more background on the words.

3. Each week we will alternate between doing spelling words and reading a book. This week is spelling. Next week will be reading.

She's really enjoying it right now, because she's literally taking control over her own learning process, plus these are words that she WANTS to know, not that I think she should know. At the moment they're random words like teacher, relationships, few, and all 12 of the months. But, she is excited, which makes me excited. : )

Hey.. wait.. what?

I'm dying today. I have a sinus infection that makes my throat burn, my head feels like it's floating while at the same time it's held firmly down by the pressure that is pounding itself in the same beating tempo as my heart. So today, Ms. Franklin is Dead And Not Yelling So Keep Your Mouths Shut Tightly, Please.

This morning, my second hour were angels after my pleading speech for them to be quiet. Then, four girls said something astonishing (and that I've touched on in other postings).

Cadiedras announced, "Ms. Franklin like our mom."

Erica, Terry, and Enise all agreed, and I started to blush. "What do you mean? Why do you say that?" I asked.

Cadiedras then said, "You give us stuff that we need. And you take good care of us. You like our mom."

Enise then said, "Yeah, you always give us stuff."

When I tried to understand more, they all shrugged and went back to what they were doing before the proclomation. I mean... what do I give them? Pencils, paper, knowledge, patience, and the occasional candy piece. But really I give nothing more. I gave Terry some cheez-its today because she didn't make it to school in time to eat breakfast, and Terry is next to useless if she's got no food in her. Plus, I don't like to starve, so why should I deny her food when I have some?

Again, something hilarious. I've been playing oldies music all day, and while the kids initally whine about it not being Z107.7 (the popular pop/rap station that I refuse to play because there are too many bad and inappropriate words for a school setting), I eventually hear them humming a refrain, or singing along, or snapping their fingers to the beat. And it seems like a balm; a calm envelopes them, strangely enough. I did the same during the first semester, and I've come to realize that they respond really calmly to the oldies while they are crazy when I play Z107.7. During Christmas season, I played Christmas music for a month straight! In January, when I announced that I was going to turn on some music, Jose M. cried out, "Please! No more Christmas music!" I laughed so hard.

Also, MAP testing is messing up my world! One more week of that dumb test, hopefully!

Relating it back to their lives

Strangely enough, I don't have much of an issue with asking kids to become involved in stories that are non-fiction or informational. The middle ages literally crave information, especially when it's about something that they want to know about.

What I've done is, whever there is something that we're supposed to start reading that is non-fiction, I allow the students to attempt to relate it back to their lives through discussions after reading. The children love knowing facts. Seth*, for example, loves reading about war-time dramas and commented, after reading a story on Hiroshima, "Ms. Franklin, did you know that if only half of the world's nuclear bombs went off that it would blow up the world? THE WORLD! That's nuts!" Any time a student can inform a teacher about something they might not know, it makes that student feel empowered with information and importance.

Another thing I have done is on projects for computer use, I have them research using the 6 questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) on a subject related to their book, or on a topic of their choosing that is a part of the book. Example: Crazy for Chocolate is a fictional book about a girl who loves chocolate, but a research project that many of my students have gotten a lot of fun from is researching the origins of chocolate, and then looking up recipes that use chocolate. Another example is from the book Money Hungry--a girl who wants nothing more than to make money in any way possible--and I have the students look up the 6 questions on how money is created and destroyed. It's a fun process that the kids like to share. As I said, any time a kid can share information that they believe you might not know or their friends might not know, makes it so that they're the teacher and you're the learner!

I LOVE TAGALONGS. THEY MAKE ME FAT AND HAPPY.

So, MAP testing has officially started. Allow me to shoot myself in the face because it's lasting for the ENTIRE month of April! We're testing every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from 7:45-9:15 for three weeks straight. Then we get squished classes, so instead of them being 50 minutes they are now around 30-35. So, basically nothing gets done in my class because our kids are so fried that they can't even think straight. Hell, I'm fried, and I'm only scribing for one of my students! Hello April Struggle! Goodbye, Days Where I Liked My Job.

I've been getting stuff done for my wedding. YAY!

I've also been having the severe itch to start writing again. It's a major part of my life--or it was before Fellows--so having no time to do so has really taken a large chunk of myself and displaced it somewhere. I have no time to even think about the next chapter of the story I started; the plot is still fresh and brewing in my mind, but if I'm not writing a paper for Fellows or doing something regarding teaching, wedding, or sleeping (oh sleep, how I miss thee), then I'm basically not existing. I just really want to write. But I don't have the time to do so. And I'm very secretive about my writing. When I found out that Mark Twain used to fret and moan over how crappy his work was until his wife and seventy other people pushed him into publishing every single work of his, it made me feel like less of a freak of nature.

Is anyone else being called Mom a lot by their students? My kids keep playing "house" and occasionally say strange things like, "You're the mom and we're the kids, Ms. Franklin!" It makes me feel strange because I've actually responded to kids calling me Mom, and I'm not a mother!! Not to mention the fact that my students randomly say things like, "MOM... I mean, MS. FRANKLIN!" They're always uber embarrassed. It's funny.